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A comment on OCaml for the Skeptical: OCaml in a Nutshell (2006). Parent comment

Re:OCaml for the Skeptical: OCaml in a Nutshell (2006) by wk_end on Sunday August 02, 2020 @05:03PM (#24031719)
I'm one of the weirdos who likes OCaml syntax, but in my eyes ReasonML is unfortunate. It fractures the community for (ironically) no real reason - not only is it a new syntax, they're now writing a new standard library for it (Belt), as though the three existing ones (plus the JS one!) weren't enough! I don't think the new syntax is particularly nice either.

I don't think js_of_ocaml supports any kind of JSX. That's the only real reason to use Reason over OCaml that I know of, and it's a good one. But if I'm being frank, even if OCaml/Reason is a nicer language overall, TypeScript is a statically-typed frontend development story that has way more community buy-in and way fewer rough edges in the ecosystem. Just use it.

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Re:OCaml for the Skeptical: OCaml in a Nutshell (2006) by zbaylin on Sunday August 02, 2020 @07:23PM (#24032666)
Belt isn't a standard library for Reason, it's a standard library for Bucklescript that has specific optimizations since it knows it's going to be compiled to JS. Reason uses the same Pervasives/Stdlib as OCaml.
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Re:OCaml for the Skeptical: OCaml in a Nutshell (2006) by modernerd on Monday August 03, 2020 @01:50AM (#24034578)
That's helpful, thanks.

The recent syntax switch[1] does feel like it will further fragment the community.

And TypeScript has some pretty attractive functional projects:

https://github.com/gcanti/fp-ts

https://github.com/Matechs-Garage/matechs-effect

[1]: https://reasonml.org/blog/bucklescript-8-1-new-syntax

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Re:OCaml for the Skeptical: OCaml in a Nutshell (2006) by brmgb on Monday August 03, 2020 @02:55AM (#24034857)
There isn't much to fragment to be honest.

From what I have seen, there seems to be little buy-in for Reason in the Ocaml community which is not particularly surprising considering it's supposed to solve a pain point no one in the community actually has (Ocaml syntax is fine - it's obviously more Algol-like than C-like but clearly the existing community doesn't care).

Reason seems to be mostly pushed by Facebook towards Javascript developers. That might work. Then again, esy is nice.

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